I admit it’s been a long time since I’ve blogged. I’d be surprised if anyone even reads it anymore since no one expects any new entries after months of no words. I have to confess that I feel quite conflicted about blogs and the whole blogging sphere. It actually frustrates me a lot when I think about it and I go back and forth on my position of blogs. I definitely think blogs have their place. They are a great tool to keep people who live far away from you in the loop. However, my confliction takes place when I realize I know more about those who I’m currently in close community with because of their blogs rather then intimacy and relationship being built authentically through our daily interactions. In this way blogs provide a sense of intimacy and community that is false and that cannot be maintained via the Internet hence, my frustration. So here I am… conflicted and confused and blogging. I haven’t completely given up on it and I have so many thoughts and things on my mind that I feel like its due time I share those with whoever might be interested—perhaps no one, but I’ll take my chances. I ask your forgiveness in advance as I try to articulate this jumble of thoughts that are in my head.

We’ve just moved this last weekend. I have to say that I truly HATE moving. I have been avoiding the whole process for a loooooong time. We literally have been living off of 15th in Ballard and managed an apartment building there for the past 5 years. After getting pregnant with our second child I realized that it wouldn’t be wise for us to continue to manage an apartment building while trying to parent my dear children, try to be a wife who is present and available for the needs of my husband and tending to my marriage, continuing my position as a Pastor at Quest Church and starting a new business as a private practitioner. I have a tendency of being over zealous and taking on too much which usually spirals me into feeling overwhelmed and not useful to anyone. So after much prayer, thought and consideration we decided to move out of our very cute apartment in Ballard and find a house that could give enough space for our growing lil’ family.

We found a really great house in Shoreline that we thought was amazing and would be a great place for our children to play and grow. The house is great—the location I’m still getting adjusted to. I absolutely love the urban lifestyle. Seattle is an amazing city. It is a progressive and liberal place. I love that people are committed to social justice, art and community. And although I don’t agree with all viewpoints and perspectives I thoroughly enjoy how people engage topics from politics to religion to art and culture so passionately, intellectually and critically-- so the move from an urban setting to a suburb where there are trees and nature and quiet on all sides is quite a transition for me. In Ballard, we lived directly across the street from Taco Bell, Blockbuster, Ivars and Taco Del Mar and I honestly never thought I’d say I miss the sirens and the noise from 15th and the constant chatter that passes right by our bedroom window, but I truly do. I’ll miss just being able to grab my daughter and walk a few blocks to Market or hop on the 15 and head down to Pike Place Market or downtown. So our move is bittersweet for me.

Our house is great and we are slowly getting settled. I think it will be an amazing opportunity for my daughters. So although it’s an adjustment I look forward to the memories we will make as a family in our new house.

That said, I found out a few weeks ago at my 18-week ultrasound that I am having another little girl. We couldn’t be more thrilled at the thought of our new girl. I wonder about this amazing little girl inside me. Who will she look like? What will her personality be like? How will her and her big sister, Isabelle grow in their relationship with each other? I am so excited and I find it fascinating that although I’ve been pregnant before I still have so many questions about this new little blessing inside me and how she will develop and grow. It is a beautiful experience that is new, fresh and hopeful.

My private practice is going really well and continues to grow. I am really exciting about the direction it’s going and how it’s fueling me in other passions and dreams I hold in my heart. I am a dreamer and I am thrilled over the future possibilities that I feel God has planted. I have almost a full clientele and I am also officiating three weddings this summer, as well as providing continued leadership at Quest, especially as Eugene takes a much needed and deserved sabbatical. It is going to be an incredibly busy summer for me, especially as this belly continues to expand before me, but I am looking forward to each role that I am filling at this point in my life. I continue to be humbled and amazed!

Future dreams still consist of going back to school and working on my doctorate. I have found a program in Seattle that I am attracted to. We’re just waiting to nurture our young family and we’ll reevaluate as we go. Please continue to pray for direction in our lives, as we have many decisions ahead of us. We’re learning what it means to integrate our dreams with the practical realities of our world each day. It is a hard lesson to learn, but we want to be faithful to the gifts that have already been given to us, as well as continue to cultivate ourselves and be open to be used in a variety of new ways. One of those dreams for me is how to integrate my passion for social justice and psychology. I keep asking how I can creatively use both to impact the world and bring change to the structure that psychologists and counselors so often get stuck in. I believe psychology can be a compassionate field and we need to find ways to make it accessible to everyone—the poor, the rich, the imprisoned and the free. No one should be marginalized from being able to access the tools and resources that counseling psychology provides.

These past four months I’ve had the privilege of co-leading a group for those who are experiencing challenges with depression and anxiety. It has been a beautiful and painful process. I have grown to love and hope for each person in the group—including myself. It has stretched me beyond my own personal comfort at times, it has been raw at times, it has been frustrating and difficult and it has been redemptive. I’ve recognized that the group has run the range of the human condition, which has been amazing and hurtful; confusing and clarifying; vulnerable and resistant. We’ve spent the four months sharing our lives, our stories, our pain and our joy and that can bring up ambivalence of all kinds.

We also studied the book: Cry of the Soul by Dan Allender and Tremper Longman III. This book takes you through a long list of emotions—especially difficult ones like anger, shame, contempt, guilt and fear. It takes these emotions and examines them from a theological perspective while challenging the audience to understand where these emotions are rooted—God. It especially looks at the difficult and raw emotions that are expressed in the Psalms and how, although scary, an honest, inviting and vulnerable approach to these emotions can bring us to deeper communion with God. This approach is contrary to what we believe we should do about rage, anger, fear and contempt, but we recognize that the psalmists did not shy away from these difficult feelings instead they lived in the tension of a God absence and the occasional God reveal.

In one of the last chapters on the Mystery of God the authors write, “God invites and elicits the cold fury of our soul because it is in the midst of this struggle to express our heart to Him that we enter the passion of our desire and engage in relationship with Him. It appears that he blesses passion, even when it opposes Him, as long as we move toward Him to wrestle with who He is. The Lord honors the heart that struggles to know Him or fight Him, because he will use all the human passion—for or against God—to capture our hearts for Him”. This reminds me of Jacob and God wrestling. I have always pondered why didn’t God just break this weasel of a man. It has always astounded me how God stayed and honored Jacob’s attempt to hold on. God did the opposite of what we expect any god to do—He stayed, He engaged, He wrestled and at the end He blessed. That is the wonderful mystery of His grace—that in our fury and in our irrational, shortsighted attempt to understand ourselves and God—He stays. In some odd and miraculous way God calls us to passionately wrestle—He calls us to come to the wrestling mat even if our ‘coming’ is motivated and fueled by our rage, our anger and our desperation. It is at this wrestling arena where a God reveal is so profound and perplexing that we are inspired and enticed to look, to stay, to fight and to see.